I figured mine was nothing special, until I decided to meet up with Mr.Muskrat and family this past Friday night (15 Aug 2003) near Dallas. He mentioned that on the way over he and Mrs.Muskrat had tried to figure out what an "atcroft" was-was it a nick/first/last name, combination, or what. In point of fact, mine is merely the concatenation of my first and middle initials with my last name, or rather (just in case anyone wondered): $atcroft = substr($name{'first'}, 0, 1) . substr($name{'middle'}, 0, 1) . $name{'last'};